Treasure of the Sierra Madre

We might call Metro by Tom Carter a palimpsest movie—one where you can read another text beneath the one on the surface. To some extent this is true of all Hollywood movies, which are made (as they nearly always have been made) with a cavalier disregard for the writer’s craft. At some point in the…

Good Will Hunting by Gus Van Sant is, like Kicked in the Head, an illustration of what happens when you hand beardless boys $20 million dollars or so and say, “Go make a movie, kid.” Good Will is better than Kicked, but then anything this side of Flubber is better than Kicked. The boys in…

An often-funny but too-bland and predictable romantic comedy that can’t find a way to live up to its potential

I tried very hard to like A Simple Plan, written by Scott B.Smith and directed by Sam (Evil Dead) Raimi, but I was only partly successful. The movie seems to have been heavily influenced by Fargo, right down to the vast and snowy prairie landscapes and the unexpectedly satisfying moralism of the ending, and, insofar…

Judy Berlin by Eric Mendelsohn is chiefly worth seeing for the performance of Edie Falco (Carmela Soprano on the HBO’s series about New Jersey gangsters) in the title role, and for its affectionate portrait of suburban Long Island, though nothing much happens in it. Also notable is the performance of the late Madeline Kahn in…

Grey Gardens by David and Albert Maysles is a re-release of the film they made in the 1970s about two women made interesting to the camera by the accident of celebrity, yet whose interest for us is owing simply to their strange and rather pathetic humanity. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter of the same…